And over the weekend, the saga regarding Canonical, GNOME, and KDE has continued. Lots of comments all over the web, some heated, some well-argued, some wholly indifferent. Most interestingly, Jeff Waugh and Dave Neary have elaborated on GNOME's position after the initial blog posts by Shuttleworth and Seigo, providing a more coherent look at GNOME's side of the story.

everyone just forgets about projects like XFCE, Enlightenment, and various window managers.

I get that they aren't that popular at the moment, but there's no reason why people can't adapt to them. Especially, if the politics of the larger projects are bothersome.

Though if we aren't in the mood for adapting to smaller projects, perhaps when things cool down people might take a good hard look at what's been going on with the feature bonanza that are DEs.

Personally, I have no clue why anyone would care about notifications. I don't use a system tray and I don't use a window manager that allows programs to alert me to their needs. It isn't their place to demand my attention, I will tend to them when I get to them. Though I don't expect other people to work like this, it's just that it might be helpful if people take a good hard look at the things they take for granted (like a system tray) and see if they really need or want that functionality (I for one don't, it's more bothersome to me than helpful.)